1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to web conferences. More particularly, the present invention provides a method, system, and computer program product for web conference participant display render acknowledgment.
2. Related Art
A web conference is an online meeting in which a moderator of the meeting shares a real-time view of his/her computer screen with remote meeting participants. Web conferences are often used to facilitate the demonstration of new software, to give a web seminar, or to facilitate a variety of other types of presentations over the Internet. A web conference provides a “visual communication” and is often used in conjunction with a telephone service (e.g., a conference call) for audio support.
The meeting moderator connects, most often using a browser, to a web conferencing server (WCS). The WCS allows the moderator the ability to share the real-time view of a particular application or an entire desktop screen with meeting participants. Similarly, each meeting participant accesses a WCS to view the shared content via a web browser on his/her machine. An illustrative web conferencing system 10 for providing a web conference is provided in FIG. 1. In this example, the web conference comprises a moderator and three meeting participants.
The web conferencing system 10 depicted in FIG. 1 generally includes a plurality of computing clients 12A-12D, each running a web browser 14, that a moderator 16 and one or more meeting participants 18A-18C use to connect to web conference servers (WCS) 20A-20C in a web conference network 22. In this example, the computing client 12A of the moderator 16 communicates with WCS 20A, the computing clients 12B and 12C of meeting participants 18A and 18B communicate with WCS 20B, and the computing client 12D of meeting participant 18C communicates with WCS 20C. It is possible, however, for the moderator 16 and all meeting participants 18 to be served by a single WCS.
Because the shared content is generally transferred from the computing client 12A of the moderator 16 to the web conference network 22 over a first network link, and from the web conference network 22 to the computing clients 12B-12D of the meeting participants 18A-18C over different network links, delays are inevitably introduced. These delays are a function of the speed and reliability of the respective network links and affect the speed at which the shared content is rendered by the browser 14 running on the computing client 12B-12D of each meeting participant 18A-18C.
Because of such network delays, the moderator 16 is never exactly sure of when the shared content they are presenting has been successfully rendered by the browser 14 running on the computing client 12B-12D of each meeting participant 18A-18C. That is, the moderator 16 does not know when each meeting participant 18A-18C actually sees the shared content communicated by the moderator 16.
To understand what the meeting participants 18A-18C are actually seeing at any given time, the moderator 16 might verbally ask the meeting participants 18A-18C (e.g., via an ongoing conference call), “Has your screen successfully rendered?,” and wait for the meeting participants 18A-18C to respond. Likewise, a meeting participant 18A-18C might interrupt the presentation (e.g., via an ongoing conference call) to verbally inform the moderator 16, “Please wait, my screen has not successfully rendered.” For web conferences with a large number of meeting participants, this quickly can become a significant problem.